One of the more consequential intellectual transformations underway in contemporary archaeology is the vibrant materialisation of the political sphere in a diverse array of global contexts, from the prehistoric to the recent past. This new archaeology of sovereignty attends not to the expectations of formal social types nor to their stentorian developmental ordering. Rather, at the forefront of analytical concern are the ways that the material world—from objects, animals and plants, to built environments and landscapes—operate simultaneously as both media of political negotiation and stakes of political struggle. In many respects, it has been the landscape turn in archaeology that has opened the door to understanding the political as a set of relationships that embed authority in place and create the conditions for social reproduction.
In his new book, Scott C. Smith offers powerful testimony to the analytical potency of a view on the politics of place-making, practices that establish spatialised relationships amongst people, animals, things and built environments. In this review, I do not focus on the work's contributions to Andean scholarship, leaving those evaluations to experts in the field. Instead, I assess the book's contributions to the politics of place, attending to its methodological and theoretical contributions. These reach well beyond the geographic focus of the work: the site of Khonkho Wankane in the Upper Desaguadero Valley of the southern Lake Titicaca basin.
The book opens with a succinct introduction (Chapter 1) that establishes the work's two overarching research objectives, one methodological and the other theoretical. Methodologically, the work aspires to develop a ‘biography of place’ that is attuned to the dynamic creation of meaning through human spatial experience and perception. This biography captures not only the negotiated, historical quality of spatial form but also the sensual qualities of spatial practice. Theoretically, the book reframes investigations of the ‘political dynamics of place-making’ around a topological, rather than a territorial, understanding of place. This entails a relational approach that defines circuits of movement and flow across disparate geographies, crystallising in the production of locales of distinct power.
Chapter 2 broaches the theoretical issues by establishing the role of place-making in the work of politics. Importantly, the argument here does not recapitulate the case for the relational co-constitution of humans and landscape, which has been made elsewhere. Rather, the author pushes this premise further by asking how privileged locations, or places, “coalesce in contexts of movement” (p. 19). The question is a critical one for studies of both politics and landscape as it concerns the vital point of articulation between the fixed and the fluid, the stable and the dynamic. It is in the relationship between these that the capacity for authority emerges.
Chapter 3 sets out the physiographic and environmental setting of the book, while Chapter 4 provides a detailed archaeological account of Khonkho Wankane, the place of principal concern to the analysis. Both are extensive discussions that warrant the attention of Andeanists. But it is in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 that the promise of a biographical approach to place is established.
In Chapter 5, the author's analytical lens is at its widest, attending to the flows of people and animals through the region via the camelid-based caravan trade. Smith provides a powerful case for the primacy of topologies over territories, illuminating the impact of regional flows in the making of emergent places. In Chapters 6 and 7, the resolution of the analytical gaze is refined to attend more directly to Khonkho Wankane and the ritual practices established at the site. Here, the complementary techniques of space syntax and proxemic analysis are brought together to provide an elegant account of the appropriation of space to the production of a powerful imagination of place. Smith shows quite convincingly how seasonal ritual practice at Khonkho Wankane initially coalesced around rituals that emphasised the convergence of diverse communities on the site, establishing it as an axis mundi. Feasting in intimate, accessible settings of ritual significance was clearly vital to this effort to locate the site within a broadly distributed cosmological cartography. Smith, however, argues that the expansion of the site's regional significance also involved a dramatic transformation of ritual practice. By the Late Khonkho period, the sensory experience of ritual had changed as alterations to the built environment led to a precipitous decline in the role of food, an increase in the control effected over spaces of ritual and a new emphasis on larger spectacle over more intimate forms. The intellectual accomplishment of these chapters is that they provide a rich account of the experience and perception of space without falling into the epistemological traps that can beset avowedly phenomenological approaches.
Smith uses Chapter 8 to offer several conclusions regarding the historical transformation of the Lake Titicaca basin (especially the eclipse of Khonkho Wankane and the ascendancy of Tiwanaku) and the theoretical implications of his biographical approach to place. While the book is quite effective overall, there are of course conceptual threads that could have used tighter stitching over the course of the manuscript. For example, the biographical approach to place adopted in the initial chapters is always implicit but only obliquely established as a fully realised methodological insight. Biography is a notoriously selective genre, so how does one craft such a representation of a place? Why is biography preferable to genealogy or history as an approach to the historicity of locations? Similarly, while topology is set in opposition to territory as rival imaginations of political space, the two are intimately related in most contexts. Circuits of movement can ultimately inscribe the polity just as patterns of territorial claim can open and close both the experience and imagination of flows. Indeed, it is the tension between the topological and the territorial that is often the most generative location for political transformation. To wit, the current backlash in Europe and North America to globalisation involves the negotiation of just this tension between a global topology of flow and a territoriality of national power.
In sum, Landscape and politics in the ancient Andes is an important and original contribution to the emerging archaeology of sovereignty and to the sustained conversation in archaeology and allied fields regarding the co-constitution of our landscapes and our politics.
